A surgical technique designed to preserve proprioceptive signals after amputation should allow patients to sense the location of their prostheses, feedback that is often compromised by convential surgery.

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Joanna Aizenberg

When Joanna Aizenberg looks at the
skeleton of a sea sponge lying on her desk, she sees more than an oddly
shaped tube. “The sponge makes this nearly perfect glass
structure,” she says. “Almost every construction principle
that we use is used by nature here, but on a scale 1,000 times
smaller.” Aizenberg, who is Gordon McKay professor of materials
science and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach professor at the Radcliffe
Institute, where she will be a fellow this fall, puts the design
principles she sees in nature—in sponges, rocks, and sea
urchins—to human ends. For instance, the brittle star (a relative
of the starfish) can change the pigment of its crystal optical lens like
a pair of light-sensitive sunglasses. By mimicking its design, Aizenberg
invented a synthetic lens that she could tune to certain wavelengths of
light. Her research draws on chemistry, biology, engineering, and math,
the last of which she has excelled at since childhood. While growing up
in Russia, she won mathematical Olympiads and precociously sent problems
of her own devising to a popular science magazine. Unfortunately, the
Russian educational system discouraged exploration beyond her chosen
field of physical chemistry. She found more freedom while earning her
Ph.D. in structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in
Israel—where her fascination with crystalline structures in sea
life began—and as a postdoctoral student at Harvard. She returned
to Harvard in 2007 after several years at Bell Labs, where working with
students serving summer fellowships convinced her that she wanted to
teach full time. She has also lectured at the New York School of Design,
where she tells students that they can find everything they study in
nature. Even in a sea sponge.